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he job of teaching * Join in the discussion reddit this Comments (1) Wendy Berliner Guardian Professional, Monday 3 October 2011 18.30 BST Article history Teacher Daniel Hartley from Chulmleigh Community College, Devon. Photograph: Apex Back in the summer we decided here at GTN HQ that, with our membership rocketing, it was the right time to mark our first six months in operation with a survey to find out what members thought about teaching today. There were questions across a wide spectrum of topics and, at the end, we left a free text box for teachers to add any comments they wanted to share. It was the dying days of the summer holiday - August 25 - when it went out just after lunch. We knew the survey would take ten or 15 minutes to complete so we weren't quite expecting what happened next, but within those first few hours after its release, we realised you had started something big. By 10.30pm that night we'd had several hundred questionnaires back, which in itself was impressive with many teachers perhaps still away on holiday or back but busy preparing for the new term. The most impressive thing of all was the content of those text boxes. There was just so much of it. Some people wrote several hundred words at a time, speaking clearly from the heart and arguing cogently against the things they felt were going wrong in education. A love of teaching and vocational pleasure felt working with children and young people emerged but it was emerging from a fog caused by far less pleasant aspects of the job - disrespect from society and governments, bullying by senior management, other teachers, parents and students, despair at the parenting skills of some homes and despair with government targets and league tables that were funnelling education into an ever thinner tube feeding stuff that improved Sats and exam results rather than nourishing a lifelong love of learning. One former solicitor questioning the sense of the switch into teaching said: " M

The Federal Government has released a smartphone application to provide quick and easy access to information about emergencies and disasters across the country. The DisasterWatch app can be downloaded for free and contains the latest public information via a direct feed from emergency response teams in each state and territory.

"Datawind, a relatively small Canadian company based in Montreal, has won an Indian government contract to produce a 7 inch touchscreen tablet named Aakash that costs $52 to manufacture and will sell, with Indian government subsidy, for $35 for universities, colleges and high schools in India. The tablet runs on Google's Android software."

"A federal government discussion paper has proposed the creation of a children's e-safety commissioner to help protect children from cyber-bullying on social media. However not everyone agrees on the proposal, which opponents say is a slippery slope to government censorship, writes Damien Carrick."

Wednesday, 01 July 2009 Education Minister Bronwyn Pike announced today that CSG Services Pty Ltd will join forces with the Brumby Labor Government to deliver the Ultranet project to every Victorian government school and to secure more than 55 new jobs over the next year.

The Australian Government will build its own $43 billion National Broadband Network, in a move that returns Australia's telecommunications economy to an era of part-public, part-private ownership.

Serious issue - just starting

"It's more than the numbers. Create CHARTS of public spending time series. Look at TABLES of spending year-by-year for central government and local authorities. "

May not have appeal beyond the UK, as that's where the data is from. Available for other countries too?

A very thought provoking and insightful interview about the efforts of governments to gain control over technology and how they justify it.

Despite its other challenges and missteps, the Obama administration has made progress in pushing the U.S. government toward becoming more technically-savvy and at least considering technology as part of the solution to a number of the problems the U.S. is currently tackling. President Obama named the nation's first federal CIO as well as its first CTO, became the first president to carry a smartphone, and his IT team opened the government's first cloud computing app store (Apps.gov).

"Students at Westall Secondary College will soon be using revolutionary Apple iPads as part of an Australian-first trial of the technology at seven Victorian Government schools. The Member for Clayton Hong Lim MP said Westall Secondary College was among the first in the state to participate in the trial."

Just thought that you would like to know that we are part of this iPad trial :-)

But after a change to a conservative government that has a very poor track record when it comes to supporting public education, Victorian teachers are slowly awakening to a very different landscape. Perhaps the most rude awakening has occurred by way of the latest notebook lease offer from DEECD.

THE NSW Department of Education and Training has dished out the first contracts for the $386 million computers-in-schools program, with the spoils going to Lenovo, Microsoft and Adobe. The computers will be given to over 200,000 government secondary school students in years 9 - 12 and 25,000 teachers across NSW.

"The online environment is an integral part of modern economic and social activities, and a vast resource of education, information, communication and entertainment. Further, the evolution of new technologies is diversifying the ways in which Australians connect with each other and the world. As part of the Government's comprehensive commitment to cyber-safety, the Australian Parliament established this Committee in March 2010. This report focuses on how young people can be empowered and connect to the Internet, and use new technologies with confidence, knowing that they can use them safely, ethically and with full awareness of risks and benefits. The facilitation of safer online environments requires government, industry and the broader community to work together to realise the benefits of the online environment while also protecting Australians from dangers and enabling them to use existing and emerging tools to mitigate risks.  

This website is part of a research project exploring the use of ICTs for learning and teaching Languages in ICT-enhanced government schools.

"This website is funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. The Safe Schools Toolkit explores the detailed characteristics of the National Safe Schools Framework, providing case studies and an online audit tool to pinpoint the areas of priority."

Many of our staff have access to iPads and are keen to use these as part of their teaching. Some are exploring the use of Google Docs, some are exploring the Ultranet and some are exploring other options. The question of privacy and security of information was raised with regards to access to information that is stored within 'the cloud'. This lead to me completing a bit of an investigation of DEECD and Victorian Government policies on where we stand with regards to storing information online using Google Docs, Evernote and other web based applications.

"Michael Fraser calls it the ''rubbish web''. That is the internet we will be left with in five to 10 years unless governments and cyber corporations fix the holes that allow criminals to infiltrate the world wide web and strip global citizens of their identity, money and dignity, he believes. In his bleak view, those who can afford it will retreat behind private corporatised security walls."